Archive — Jamie Lyons
collusion (n.) late 14c., from Old French collusion, from Latin collusionem (nominative collusio) "act of colluding," from colludere, from com- "together" + ludere "to play," from ludus "game" (i.e. ludicrous).Collusion: you can't fake it. You either trust someone enough to let them break your shit, or you don't. Either you're willing to build something that couldn't exist without the other person's hands all over it, or you're just playing director, delegating tasks, checking boxes. Real collusion? That's a different animal. That's when you show up knowing your work has value, you've earned that much, but you also know, deep in your gut, that what you're making together will be bigger, weirder, better than anything you'd make alone. And every person involved feels it. That electricity. That's the thing you can't manufacture. I've seen it work. Hell, I've been part of it. Theater productions where we took the stage and made it mean something because someone else saw what I couldn't. Photography projects where another set of eyes caught the frame I'd have walked right past. Some of these partnerships lasted decades. Others burned bright for six days and then imploded spectacularly. That's fine. Some partnerships aren't built for the long haul. They're meant to be incandescent, to light up the room for a moment, and then become ash. You don't mourn those. You remember them. The ones that last, twenty-five years, circling back when the work matters more than the complications, those are different. Those are about understanding that you both change. The work changes. What you needed at twenty-five isn't what you need at fifty. But if the foundation is solid, if there's mutual respect, if you're both willing to see what the other brings to the table, you can come back. You can build again. That's collusion. Messy, uncomfortable, occasionally brilliant. The sum exceeding the parts because every part knows it.
See also: Alonzo King LINES Ballet; Chocolate Heads; We Players; Theater Theater; Franconia Performance Salon.
Collusion 2025
I left a six month old baby at home to chase this thing. Let that sit in your chest for a minute. I walked away from someone who doesn’t understand time yet, who won’t remember my absence but felt it in their bones anyway, to go stand on a volcano half a world away with […]
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Collusion 2024
The light up here doesn’t give a shit about my plans. It’s volcanic, primal, the kind of unforgiving brilliance that strips away pretense and leaves me with nothing but the raw fact of a human body suspended against oblivion. Babatunji of LINES Ballet is launching himself into that void above Mafate, and my finger’s on […]
ReadCollusion 2023
Here’s the thing about Aleta Hayes and those Stanford Facilities Operations workers that nobody wants to say out loud because it makes the PhD crowd uncomfortable as hell: these guys with their hands in the dirt, their backs bent over root systems and drainage patterns, thirty to fifty feet up in the goddamn canopy where […]
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Collusion 2023
The real work happens in the stuff everybody else is throwing out. That’s it. That’s the whole goddamn secret. Most people file that stuff under “ignore and move on.” They’re right to do that, if they want to stay functional, keep their jobs, not alienate their friends. But if I’m trying to make something that […]
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Collusion 2022
Don’t go to a museum with a destination. Museums are wormholes to other worlds. They are ecstasy machines. Jerry Saltz The Cantor sits there on Stanford’s campus like every other institutional temple to dead things under glass, all that marble and hush and carefully calibrated light designed to make you whisper and feel appropriately small. […]
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Collusion 2021
I don’t do second takes. I don’t revisit. The world’s too big, too full of places I haven’t screwed up yet, haven’t disappointed myself in. But La Réunion? La Réunion gets a pass. First time around, I barely scratched the surface of this French-African-Indian Ocean fever dream floating off Madagascar’s coast. This time, I’m back […]
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Collusion 2021
The pandemic turned everyone into bargain basement Beckett characters, didn’t it? Waiting for something that wasn’t coming, performing rituals in squares on screens, and here’s Aleta Hayes doing the honest work: admitting that rites of spring might just be imagined anyway, might always have been a kind of mass hallucination we agreed to because the […]
ReadCollusion 2019
Bodies defying the institutional geometry, movement carving rebellion into all that brutalist concrete and those sterile fluorescent slashes. This is what I’m talking about. This is the escape velocity made flesh. I’m talking about that electric moment when you’re three drinks deep into a conversation that matters, when the music’s so loud it rewires your […]
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Collusion 2019
Chocolate Heads: The Chocolate Ball for Polymaths in Green Library, Stanford University. He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast. Leonardo da Vinci Chocolate Heads: The Chocolate Ball for Polymaths Green Library, Stanford University. A performance as part […]
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Collusion 2019
Réunion Island Volcano with Alonzo King LINES Ballet. You stand there in front of someone else’s vision, whether it’s Diane Arbus showing you how broken people are beautiful or Cartier-Bresson with his decisive moment horseshit, and it gets inside you like a virus, like Burroughs’ language virus, and suddenly you’re not seeing anymore, you’re remembering […]
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Collusion 2019
Pole Star isn’t ballet as usual or some cross cultural mash note. This is something else, bodies moving through my Reunion Island footage like they are mapping coordinates between volcanic eruptions and the đàn bầu’s single string howl, between lava fields cooling into black glass and Vietnamese tradition stretched taut across a stage at YBCA […]
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Collusion / Industries 2018
Big name/legendary collaborations are usually a letdown. Two “titans” get in a room together and suddenly everyone’s so fucking precious about their legacy that nothing actually happens, just a lot of careful posturing and committe meeting compromise dressed up in press release language about “exciting new directions” and “boundary-pushing work.” But thirty-five years? Thirty-five years […]
ReadCollusion 2018
The thing about photographing dance is that I’m not actually photographing the dance at all. I’m photographing the spaces between moments, the electrical current that runs from one impossible position to the next, the split-second where a human body tells me something about physics and grace and mortality that I can’t articulate any other way. […]
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Collusion 2018
I have been both a ghost and haunted in the city I love. Rebecca Solnit The fog comes in off the Pacific like it owns the place. Because it does. And somewhere in Sea Cliff, where the money lives quiet and the views cost more than most people make in a lifetime, there are ballet […]
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Collusion 2018
This is the physical manifestation of erosion meeting precision, meat meeting myth at the absolute crumbling edge of America. Sutro Baths was always a monument to hubris, some gilded age dream of swimming pools carved into coastal apocalypse, and now it’s just honest ruins, which is when things finally get interesting. These dancers aren’t in […]
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Collusion 2018
The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity… and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself. William Blake, Letters I […]
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Collusion 2018
A site specific dance with Alonzo King LINES Ballet in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. At night I dream that you and I are two plantsthat grew together, roots entwined,and that you know the earth and the rain like my mouth,since we are made of earth and rain.Pablo Neruda, Regalo de un Poeta
ReadCollusion 2018
The thing about catching bodies in motion against those gritty San Francisco Chinatown backdrops, I’m threading this beautiful needle between the pristine and the profane, right? The classical line meeting the cracked sidewalk. It’s not some precious art school contradiction; it’s the only honest collision that matters. And we’re doing this from on top of […]
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Collusion 2018
Figures in a California Landscape: a dance performance by movement troupe Chocolate Heads inspired by Manuel Neri’s sculptures in The Anderson Collection at Stanford University. This piece is part of a year long Aleta Hayes/Chocolate Heads project exploring the idea of California. Native Californian, Manuel Neri with his interest in the human figure, provoked this deepened […]
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Collusion 2017
I’ve seen a lot of weird shit in sacred spaces, but Aleta Hayes’ Chocolate Heads turning Stanford’s Memorial Church into some kind of Byzantine hallucination hits different when that same building held my father’s memorial service. When my brother, who hated Stanford with a kind of pure contempt that honestly scared me, inexplicably chose to […]
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Collusion 2017
The Chocolate Heads came slithering through Pace Gallery’s pristine white corridors like they’d been unleashed from some wild ritual, all limbs and fabric swaddling their skulls, moving against David Hockney‘s lurid iPad Yosemites like beautiful vandals crashing a country club. This wasn’t some precious dance meets art dialogue. This was collision, the kind where you can’t […]
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Collusion 2017
It’s Inauguration Day, right? Day one of the Trump Era… So naturally everyone’s freaking out, reciting founding values like scripture, as if Thomas Jefferson’s ghost gives two shits about your a cappella group. But that’s not what’s happening in these frames. What’s happening is bodies moving through sacred architecture like they’re trying to shake loose […]
ReadCollusion 2016
The fight is won or lostfar away from witnesses –behind the lines,in the gym,and out there on the road,long before I dance under those lights.Muhammad Ali Inga Weiss was the real deal in a world drowning in polite academic horseshit. This woman looked at post-war Germany, her good parents in Ansbach, the comfortable life, all […]
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Collusion 2016
Look at them. Amber and Judy. First ones on the Roble Theater stage (now the Harry J. Elam Jr. Theater) in this space that still smells like fresh paint and possibility. You know what that means? That means there’s no roadmap. No one’s fucked it up here yet. No one’s nailed it yet either. Just […]
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Collusion 2016
I get it. They did what they always do, what they’ve been doing to everything worth a damn since some MBA sociopath figured out you could monetize nostalgia and sell it back as “progress.” They took something old, something with actual soul (remember soul?), something that had earned every water stain, every crack in its […]
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Collusion 2016
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover and the poet Are of imagination all compact: One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of […]
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Collusion 2015
I documented Aleta Hayes and The Chocolate Heads‘ Space Launch thing at McMurtry, and it’s exactly the kind of beautiful, ridiculous, necessary chaos that makes you remember why live art matters. They’re building these chocolate head sculptures like some kind of collective ritual… tactile, ephemeral, with that Warhol meets launch pad energy where high concept […]
ReadCollusion 2015
Three of us got together one October night and decided to fuck with Sophocles in a bathtub… spiritually, archaeologically, perversely. Rebecca Ormiston, Ryan Tacata, and I took one measly line from a dead Greek’s lost play and turned it into something called Cloud Talk for this outfit we hoped would be called Artist Weather TV, […]
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Collusion 2015
He who opens a school door, closes a prison. Victor Hugo Art that actually fucking means something: it doesn’t happen in galleries with wine and cheese and people pretending to understand what “liminal space” means. It happens in a bookstore that’s half-collapsed into its own beautiful chaos, where the shelves lean like drunks and the […]
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Collusion 2015
So here’s how it ends: not with a bang but with institutional validation, which is the same as saying it ends with a whimper dressed up in gallery lighting. Franconia Performance Salon #14. The Museum of Performance + Design. A “joint collaboration,” which is fancy talk for “we got legitimized.” From Michael’s living room with […]
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Collusion 2015
The wine was flowing, cheap and plentiful. The food? Thrown together. Not Michael’s usual spread, no carefully considered dishes that made you remember why communal eating matters. The kind of afterthought that tells you nobody’s heart is really in it anymore. The audience. Fuck me, the audience. The Game of Thrones Burning Man type has […]
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Collusion 2015
Look at these people. Really look at them. These are theater people, the real kind. The ones doing Genet in a defunct federal building in San Francisco. Site-specific theater, which means they’re not just memorizing lines; they’re wrestling with architecture, with history, with the bones of a building that’s got more stories than any script. […]
ReadCollusion 2014
A learned fool is more a fool than an ignorant fool. Molière So here’s the thing about watching someone saw a table in half at what amounts to an art salon in someone’s basement or warehouse or wherever the hell these things happen anymore: it’s the most honest thing you’re gonna see all night. None […]
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Collusion 2014
Collaboration: three people trying to figure out how to make Shakespeare’s storm feel real when the actual wind off the Pacific is already doing half the work. We’re not building a set. We’re negotiating with architecture that predates us and will outlast us, trying to figure out where bodies should stand, how voices will […]
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Collusion 2014
Here’s a human, here’s a beach, here’s a poem about desire that refuses to behave itself. Figure it out. Maybe that’s the whole point. These words still work. They still cut. We’re still wrestling with the same beautiful mess: who we love, how we love, what we’re allowed to say about it, and whether […]
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Collusion 2014
Decay, it doesn’t announce itself with trumpets. It seeps in through the cracks like cigarette smoke under a bathroom door, until one night you’re sitting in what used to be a vital space and you realize you’re watching a wake, not a party. Franconia Performance Salon #11. By this point, the whole enterprise had that […]
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Collusion 2014
So here’s what happened at Franconia Performance Salon #10, and going into this one was half an admission of cultural masochism, and the other half a desperate hope that someone, anyone, was going to do something that matters. Nick Berger’s documentary was the evening’s unexpected grace note. Beautiful, moving, words we throw around until they […]
ReadCollusion 2014
Frank Smigiel, from SFMOMA, calls me up and asks if I want to play the Mayor of San Francisco. Not the actual mayor, but some conceptual version of a mayor in a performance piece by these South African artists in the Mission District. I’m thinking: Why me? I’m not an actor. I’m not a politician. […]
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Collusion 2013
So it’s basically a haircut. Performance art as a goddamn haircut. Niki with scissors, Michael sitting there probably feeling vulnerable and exposed and wondering if this is profound or if he’s just getting a trim in front of an audience that showed up because there was cheap wine and they knew the artists. And you […]
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Collusion 2013
Nothing, nothing, compares to watching people really lose their shit laughing. Not polite chuckling. I’m talking about that deep, uncontrollable, tears-streaming-down-your-face kind of laughter that makes you forget every goddamn thing that’s wrong with the world. There’s this moment, right? When someone’s guard drops completely. Their face contorts, their shoulders shake, and they make sounds […]
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Collusion 2013
The images themselves are gorgeous in that way that makes me suspicious. Too composed, too deliberate. This first shot with the bodies arranged like they’re performing an autopsy on performance itself. And that Gertrude Stein quote stuck at the bottom like a fortune cookie aphorism: “This is the lesson that history teaches: repetition.” Yeah, no […]
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Collusion 2013
O, never Shall sun that morrow see! Your face, my thane, is as a book where men May read strange matters. To beguile the time, Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye, Your hand, your tongue: look like the innocent flower, But be the serpent under’t. He that’s coming Must be provided for: […]
ReadCollusion 2013
I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it. John Cage Collected Works John Cage Lecture on Nothing. PSi, Stanford Michael Hunter and Derek Phillips did John Cage‘s Lecture on Nothing at the Performance Studies International conference. Stanford’s Roble Gym. The old fencing studio, before they […]
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Collusion 2013
I don’t know what the fuck happened in that room, but I know something happened. This is the thing nobody tells you about live performance, about actual live performance, not the kind where everyone’s mentally composing their Instagram caption while politely golf clapping: it’s supposed to be theft. Grand fucking larceny. That’s the whole beautiful, […]
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Collusion 2013
Most of this is complete bullshit. Not because the artists are frauds, though some are, but because they’re trying. They’re performing performing. They’ve got this idea in their heads about what transgressive looks like, what experimental sounds like, what matters, and they’re executing that idea with all the spontaneity of a tax return. And then […]
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Collusion 2013
You walk into the Performance Art Institute expecting some precious meditation on process, maybe a little performative navel gazing with power tools as props. What you get instead is Angrette dropping a fucking bomb on the whole polite machinery of artistic intention, and she does it with hammers, two by fours, the San Francisco Building […]
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Collusion 2012
You are ugly when you love her, you are beautiful and fresh, vital and free, modern and poetic when you don’t… you are more beautiful as an orphan than as your mother’s son. Witold Gombrowicz Gombrowicz understood something most people spend their whole lives avoiding: silence is the ultimate obscenity in a world built on […]
ReadCollusion 2012
My photographs catch people mid-transformation, Yula Paluy suspended in whatever private negotiation she’s having with gravity and self. Tiffany Trenda projecting outward while the room pulls inward. What’s gorgeous and sad is knowing these salons are a kind of endangered ecosystem, people still willing to show up, sit down, shut up, and be there for […]
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Collusion 2012
These aren’t just photographs of bodies doing things in rooms, they’re evidence of something that mattered, at least for one night, in a living room that was never the same afterward. Kelly Rafferty, Michael Hunter, Derek Phillips, Niki Ulehla, Angrette McCloskey and Raegan Truax… these aren’t just names that matter to seventeen people in the […]
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Collusion 2012
It’s a hot summer night in San Francisco, the kind that feels like a mistake, like the city forgot what it’s supposed to be, and I’m at Michael’s house for salon number three. I don’t want to be here. I should be literally anywhere else. And for some reason as I’m thinking about this night […]
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Collusion 2012
So here’s the real truth: I’d just bought a Canon 5D Mark II and I’d found this gorgeous 1950s Zeiss 35mm lens, put an adapter on it, and I was looking for any excuse to shoot with the damn thing. That’s it. That’s why these photos exist. That’s pretty much why this website exists. And […]
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Collusion 2011
Failure… it’s the only fucking meal worth eating when you’re stupid enough to think you can improve Anton Chekhov. My Head is Burning. Christ, of course it is. Your head, their heads, Chekhov’s rotting tubercular head somewhere in a Russian cemetery still burning with the knowledge that a hundred years later, some ambitious assholes with […]
ReadCollusion 2011
Niki Ulehla went to the San Francisco dump, not to throw something away, but to find something, and she pulled Dante’s entire cast of the damned out of discarded lumber, scrap metal, and abandoned leather, carved them into marionettes, and staged the Inferno right there among the mountains of our collective waste. This is the […]
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Collusion 2010
Just as one can compose colors, or forms, so one can compose motions. Alexander Calder So here I am, belly-down on the floor of a Dogpatch studio, camera in hand, staring into the wooden faces of two dead-eyed puppet boys who’ve seen things… Hansel and Hansel. Niki Ulehla makes marionettes. Not the kind you remember […]
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Collusion 2010
Speculation: Friends around a table, wine flowing, talking about impossible things like how the fuck we’re going to mount a puppet show in a living room. This is Niki’s vision we’re serving here. And when I say serving, I mean it in the most primal sense. Everyone at this table, Nat included, is there to […]
ReadCollusion 2006
Email... Rick, Some stockbroker lunatic came up with something amazing. Plymouth-Dakar Challenge. Buy a £100 shitbox. Drive 4,400 miles through Morocco, Western Sahara, Mauritania to The Gambia. No race. No prize. J ust you versus the desert versus entropy. When you arrive, if... auction the car for charity. They've done this since 2003. Teachers. […]
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